custom furniture

Black Walnut Bedroom

I would like to share these images of a black walnut bedroom, including a king-sized bed, side tables and a dresser, designed and built with my best friend Cody Rolph. We started this project in 2017 and finished it in 2020.

The design and joinery of the pieces in this group hopefully don’t arbitrarily feature pretty slabs of wood, but intend to capture or rather release the light and cadence of the old trees we collaborated with to build humble furniture. We try to see our human efforts humbly in the light of the wrought out witness which the trees spent their lives fashioning.

One of the trees we used for this came from the Walnut River valley near Augusta, Kansas, where it was uprooted and set for a number of years suspended by its roots and crowns. My personal experience suggests this process of drying “in the log”lends a quality to the color- different to other air drying methods. Another walnut tree we used came from Cody’s land in a draw on the county line between Greenwood and Elk counties. A third came from a farm near Winfield, KS- on the banks of the Arkansas River- where we scavenged the rejected leavings of a logging operation. All of these trees have peculiar and noble stories and voices, as expressions of a land and of its mineral and even spiritual atmosphere.

There are over 500 ebony and walnut butterfly joints throughout the pieces. Many of these serve a structural function, in knitting together knots and fractures throughout the slabs. We made the decision to use them aesthetically and rhythmically as well, in an attempt to interact with the movement and tension present in the slabs and their juxtapositions. Every butterfly was individually made and cut in by hand. This isn’t necessarily a testament to skill, but to the frail beauty of hand made lines versus machined perfection. The long labor isn’t to impress, but hopes to be a contemplative act of prayer in process, and to invite and serve that same response in the viewer.

In the same contemplative spirit, all of the structural joints are “through” mortise and tenons, with hand cut dovetails on all of the casework and drawers. The hardware are re-purposed spikes from a derelict centenarian railroad bridge located on Cody’s land.

Thank you for taking the time to look at these images of my friend Cody’s and my celebration and wonder at the crystalized voice of our God in the ligneous song of our brother-trees. Thank you especially to Steve Hebert for having the gifts and knowledge to be able to photograph these pieces for us.

Christogram

Christogram in black walnut as the central panel in a pulpit that my friend Taylor Johnson is building.

Circle Table in Black Walnut

I built this round walnut table for a young family over the summer and into the fall. The base is mortise and tenon. I hoped for it to carry some of the feeling of the vaulted interior of a timber framed barn. The wood for the base came from gun stock maker in Wichita who gave me some timber from his stock before he passed away. The wood for the top was harvested from my friend’s land near Fall River, Kansas.

Crane Cabinets in Ebonized Walnut

Below is a gallery of images of a pair of cabinets built for the bathroom of a couple in Wichita. They are constructed from native (specifically South Eastern Kansas) black walnut, solid and veneered, and white oak. The exterior surfaces were “ebonized” using a process which employs the chemical reaction of an iron solution with tannins in the wood, rendering it black. The design of cranes and bamboo were carved into the surface revealing again the natural color of the walnut in the incised lines. I hired Taylor Johnson to build the casework itself. Using traditional methods, the interior framework is a solid skeleton held together with dovetail and mortise and tenon joints. Taylor fabricated plywood with extra thick shop-made walnut veneer to be able to handle carving without passing through to the inner layers. His focus and skill allowed me to give attention to the design challenges and the artwork and carving and exterior finishing the cabinets. My gratitude goes out to Taylor for his tenacity and dedication to excellence, and also to Steve Hebert, who generously gave his time and energy to brilliantly photograph the cabinets in situ.

Trestle Table in Black Walnut

I delivered this table to my client’s office last week. It is good to finish a piece and be able to celebrate it. In spite of this I tend to experience a wide range of emotions and second guessing when I finish a job. One thing that never changes though is the gratitude I feel at the opportunity to be a woodworker, one who engages the authentic witness of the trees. They always have a real story to tell about our God and His majesty and faithfulness.

Trestle Table in Black Walnut

Discovering Design

The discovery of the life within the wood and the relationships they form is exciting to uncover. The early decisions are heavy. Every other act in the process is a response to these chalk marks as they try to hear and echo this walnut tree’s voice.

Underpinning Art with Discipline

The romance of the craft is backed up by countless hours of “mundane” work- the discipline that builds skill, and makes up the real life of labor. Days are spent creeping up on this scribed relationship and the foundational joinery. It’s a blessing to work, and to rest in the presence, at the same while striving towards the goal. Don’t mistake me, I’ve only had enough meager success at it to know it’s possible.

Technology – Joinery

One side of the natural edge was curving away on bottom edge so I had to cut a shallow rebate in order to have a solid joint as well as cleanly scribed edge. This edge was reinforced with dominoes. The opposing edge curved towards the bottom edge and could be cut square. For it I made a floating contoured spline from Baltic birch. Assembled dry all is tight and solid.

Visualize and Establish Form

Finding a way to visualize the elements in a design is an engaging challenge. Krenov spoke of “composing”, and I’ve adopted his method and language -clamping up and mocking up relationships as the process moves forward. I don’t recall if he used tape, but I recently switched from using blue tape to white tape to mask off shapes- the difference is remarkable.

Labor – Engaging Harvest

The last bit of joinery for the individual trestles is the horizontal rail completing the “H” form, which will eventually carry the longer rail that will join the two trestles together.

I’m grateful for this job, this material, this process. I heard a song that had a line which proclaimed “I am the record of His grace”.

Almanac of the Wheel of Life: The Farm at Mid-Winter

What does it mean to be a steward of life? It is an unspoken question threaded through my days. Each winter we carry more lives through to the hope of spring. It is the nature of a farm and a family grow, a response to a holy invitation. In our stewardship, we learn to leverage the outward death of winter to build the inner life. Roots and bones. Back to the earth in the compost of the old year, manure and trampled hay, sawdust and wood shavings, in cover crops and dormant roots, even the bones of the dead under the heap or in the earth. Those failures of the past year kindle study and deeper investigations into the principles of agriculture and life. The wheel of life rolls away as a witness to the nature of God, always redeeming death and turning it into the living.

The oblique light comes with a more subtle potency not felt in the haste of summer, illuminating details made bare by the dearth and otherwise overlooked. It is not all romance of slanting light. There is the mud and the death and sickness. There are the broken systems and the unfinished jobs, and the detritus of unclean life scattered everywhere. The butcher sighed and smiled and cried “Ahh, life!” and thanked God as he cut the throat of the lamb. It seems that to live is to accept and know death, and to die is to understand and accept life. It is a mystery that I don’t claim to understand.

“For I know that this shall turn out to my salvation through your prayer and the support of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, according to my earnest expectation and my hope that in nothing shall I be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always so now also, Christ shall be Magnified in my body, whether it be by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:19-21

A new print and BAUMWERKSHOP, our new online store

*A Witness, the Heavenly Counsel*, 2018 linocut print by Jack Baumgartner

Baumwerkshop

Marketing my work has always been precarious territory for me. At a fundamental level, I am much more interested in making my work than trying to sell it. Philosophically and morally, I struggle with the slippery slope of salesmanship and authenticity. Authenticity as a word has already been pretty much trashed by our cultural trend towards filtered-authenticity in order to generate likes and sell products. I am certainly guilty of it, myself. Likes are addictive. But it all leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth. It is hard to not feel like marketing breeds a certain level of dishonesty that we have decided to be ok with as a society.

Usually my work is both deeply personal and (I hope) deeply spiritual. I struggle often with the feeling that I am prostituting both myself and the things of God when I set out to peddle these visual representations in the marketplace. I don’t really have a satisfying resolution for this uncomfortable feeling, except for the opposing weight of the reactions of “my” audience, expressing a desire to share in these things.

I do want to sell my work and provide an income for my family and finance future projects. It is a part of life and a part of growing, of being fruitful. It is part of work, which is a divine invitation.

I have a calling to make art and what I hope are beautiful objects, and useful pieces of furniture. I have a calling to make that work accessible to the culture I am a part of. I want to try to do that in as straightforward a way as I know how. This new web store is an effort to do that.

You can get to the store by going to https://baumwerkshop.com, or you can select the menu of this sight and click on “Purchase Work“. I really do hope that you will visit and let me know what you think. I also really hope that you might purchase something, if you see something you like. There should be some exciting new things showing up there in the coming weeks.

Thank you, for supporting me and following along on this journey. God is good.

Jack

The Sacred Process

Is labor a sacrament? The invitation of the Eighth Day? A sacred collaboration with the living God? I can’t help but to note that the call to labor in the garden came before the curse of toil. I am certain that labor is about more than just earning my bread. There is something deeper there, not just for the artist, but for the ditch digger and the roofer, the farmer and the nurse. “Whatever you think, it’s more than that…” ISB.